Google lets users slurp own Gmail, Calendar data

export my search history

No! Hell no. Especially the searches from my laptop late at night. No. Not on yours or anyone else's nelly!

They're welcome to keep that and use it to sell me Justin Bieber MP3s just don't let me remember it!

Since the start of Google Mail I have used its POP access from my email client to download local copies of messages.

They only do it because they legally have to.

The "Data Liberation Front" stuff is just posturing - "Look we let you export your data because we are so open and friendly and definitely not evil. (And also we don't want a multi-billion pound fine)".

They have to allow users to obtain data about themselves under Data Protection Act for a maximum fee of £10.

Technically not all of it would be required because not all of it is "about" the user. But working out which bits are exempt would be a manual job which there is no way they want to do, and in any case cannot be done for £10. (The fact that you sent an email is information about you. The contents may or may not be about you. But to determine that someone would have to read it. Easier just to say "it is your data, download it if you want").

So in fact they have a legal obligation to allow export of a subset, which subset could only be determined at great cost. Therefore, in practice, they have no option whatsoever but to provide an "export everything" function.

So with a billion users, what else can they do but form a team and say "provide a self-managed export-everything function".

And also because, morally, it is the user's property. An increasingly rare example of law doing its proper job of being the enforceable legal embodiment of a moral right.

What about IMAP?

I've used IMAP to upload emails I had downloaded from one service to another service through Thunderbird and other mail clients before. How is this new, exactly - that you don't have to rely on an email client to download the data now?